That's a line of thought I often see but... In the end all she did manage was to land herself in jail for 11 years. That's not "genius". Not even smart. That's just plain dumb. To win a stupid prize, it takes a stupid person to play a stupid game.
And I cannot wait to see the stupid prize that "altruistic genius" SBF gets.
Agreed, but not only stupid, she has some kind of sociopathic disorder which is what's causing all this chaos. And the pretty disgraceful idea to bring lives into the world that would depend on her to try and get herself out of it. I can't help but see her having children as yet another calculated, cynical and nutty move on her part.
People in this thread are confusing satisfaction in the justice system for schadenfreude. It’s just nice to see people who have done wrong held accountable.
Look, this story is stupid. It was a 3-leg trip she speculatively booked while appealing her sentence. If she was genuinely trying to flee the country, she would not have booked a 1-way flight months ahead of time.
She can afford a round trip ticket, bought at the airport on the day of departure. Or fled across the Mexico border. Or smuggled herself out on a boat. There are SO MANY ways to flee the country that are not shouting "HEY FYI TO THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT — I'M LEAVING FOR A BIT".
Here's the quote from the article, which is very short:
> Prosecutors had attempted to argue that Holmes did pose a flight risk, revealing that her partner had bought her a one-way flight to Mexico shortly before the verdict was returned. While Davila called the travel plans a “bold move” and Holmes’s failure to cancel the ticket post-conviction a “perilously careless oversight”, he accepted her assertion that she was not trying to flee the country.
Maybe I'm not the kind of risk taker that steals a billion dollars, but 11 years playing golf with Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff at Club Fed sounds vastly preferable to being on the run for your entire life.
Even getting into a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty isn't going to help you. An extradition treaty is just a streamlined process for extraditing criminals - unless you're a natural citizen, or there's a particular geopolitical reason (Snowden), there's ~zero reason for why your host country won't make a one-off exemption for you.
Being on the run is not exactly the same thing as living in some 10 million dollar mansion in some non-extradition country.
What would the feds be willing to pay for her? Snowden got asylum so some minor power could piss off and show up a geo-political rival. She would just gift 1 million dollars to some king who would just claim that she was not in his county when America came asking for her extradition.
"It’s unclear why Shah asked to serve at that specific prison but People says other notable inmates who have been sent to the Bryan camp have included Hidalgo County, Texas, Commissioner Sylvia Handy; Jenna Ryan, who participated in the January 6 Capitol attack; and Lea Fastow, a former assistant treasurer at Enron."
>Maybe I'm not the kind of risk taker that steals a billion dollars, but 11 years playing golf with Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff at Club Fed sounds vastly preferable to being on the run for your entire life.
Except Martha Stewart was released from prison 18 years ago[0], Bernie Madoff is male, so is in a men's prison and those with Federal prison sentences of ten years or longer are not eligible for minimum security (or "club fed", as you put it) facilities[1]. As such, she will likely serve her sentence in a "low security" facility rather than a "minimum security" facility[2].
[1] I searched around and couldn't find the specific rules. However, I posted here (several years ago, not going to go through a few hundred pages of posting history to find it. Sorry.) about wanting to commit a non-violent, Federal felony and receive a long Federal prison sentence in a minimum security ("club fed") facility as a retirement strategy on a par with Medicaid funded assisted living facilities. The former not requiring you to spend all your assets (okay, you can keep $2000) to be eligible. I was informed, with links that sentences of ten years or more are not eligible for Federal minimum security facilities.
> The former not requiring you to spend all your assets (okay, you can keep $2000)
Medicaid is a state-federal program, and states may have higher asset limits (Californa, for instance, raised it from the federal baseline $2000 individual/$3000 married couple to $130,000 + $65,000 for additional family member.)
>Medicaid is a state-federal program, and states may have higher asset limits (Californa, for instance, raised it from the federal baseline $2000 individual/$3000 married couple to $130,000 + $65,000 for additional family member.)
I was unaware that there was variation by state. Thanks for sharing that!
Where would you even go? Who‘d even want you? Russia? A life in either one of the few countries that doesn‘t do extraditions to the USA or staying in hiding, always afraid, sounds miserable.
Sure, but compared to jail? I could imaging preferring living in a small cabin off the grid in some remote place as an alternative. She obviously deserves it, but in the hypothetical case the alternatives don’t seem all that terrible.
Prison for 11 years, realistically prison for 5 years and then a supervised release. It's not the end of the world. And she will still be able to see her kids by doing this.
No, Federal prisons aren't subject to parole or supervised release. There are limited credits for good behavior that max out at 15% of her sentence so the best possible outcome for her is serving 9 years and 7 months of her 135 month sentence. She won't be out of prison before 2033.
Holmes was charged with a federal crime and there is currently no parole for federal crimes. [0] She will do almost all of the 11 years. There is a good conduct reduction, which caps out at 54 days a year, so it's possible she could get out in 9 1/2 years. [1]
Doesn't need to be parole. It could be home confinement under the CARES act.
Michael Conahan from kids for cash was sentenced to 17.5 years and only served 10 before being allowed to go to home confinement - I'm sure Elizabeth can find a way.
It's a federal sentence so she will be doing most of the time assigned. Each year of good behavior gets up to 47* days taken off the prisoner's sentence. IIRC, these are awarded at the end of each year in prison, so you can't just calculate 11*47 to get the reduction as if she behaves, she'll only be in nine and a partial year. She'll miss out on those last two years of sentence reductions.
Does she even have any considerable assets? Fleeing the country and living like a queen in Bahrain is totally different from fleeing the country and needing to work for a living still.
On one hand she's a crook. On the other hand she scammed Ruper Murdoch, Kissinger, the DeVos family and a bunch of other ghouls that deserve to be robbed.
I guess in the end there we're more innocent victims than ghouls taken to the cleaners.
She took money from some despicable characters. She let people in her care suffer "to reach God" but had the best medical care for herself, when she fell sick. Her organization did not keep good records of financial transactions or pay correct taxes. That is just what I can remember. You can Google, lots of good sources are around.
She is not a person to look up to. Organized religion disappoints, 99 times out of 100
She defrauded people who would go to court and claim fraud laws are unconstitutional restrictions on speech if it served their purpose. They’re opportunists who will spin whatever tune empowers them.
Murdoch and co’s only life skill is being rich which mesmerizes those who think fiat economics and American civic life are divine mandates of a higher power even if they don’t belong to a traditional religion.
Okay. Mother Teresa was (according to some) a nasty, torturing bitch. Fair enough.
I actually selected her as an example because off the cuff I couldn't think of someone else that some significant proportion of folks here on HN wouldn't say exactly that about. I guess I shouldn't have used a real person as an example. Lesson learned. N.B.: I am an atheist and find the Catholic Church (not specific Catholic adherents, I judge individuals based on their individual behavior) to be, in the main, a bad thing.
My point wasn't to glorify Mother Teresa (or anyone else). Rather, I was pointing out that it wouldn't have mattered who Theranos' investors were, Holmes would have defrauded them too.
Perhaps a better example would have been an attorney who works 60 hours a week at their day job doing pro-bono cases and litigating malicious/unfair prosecutions of innocent people, then funds and runs a soup kitchen/food pantry for the hungry another 40 hours a week. Is that better?
I'm sure some segment of the folks here will decry even that person too, as a rabble-rouser trying to destroy civilization through wealth redistribution (one bowl of soup and a piece of bread at a time) and questioning the authority of the police and prosecutors.
Who are, of course, the salt of the earth and only do what they do for the best of reasons (cf. The Innocence Project, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, The Central Park Five, etc., etc,. etc.) /s
So I'll make the point again without the distraction (causing folks to ignore my point -- apologies for sending you down the Mother Teresa rat hole?) of an actual, flawed, human being:
Holmes would almost certainly have defrauded any investors, regardless of your (the general 'you' here) opinion of the value of that particular persons' moral/ethical bona fides.
Then hold him accountable for any crimes he has committed. No amount of stealing money from fraudulent investments is going to solve or help convict him of war crimes.
how does that address the point that committing crimes against bad people is still bad? if you start to make exceptions for people you don't like you're just flushing the whole Enlightenment "let's stop persecuting Protestants/Catholics when they're not in power" thing down the toilet.
You don't think anyone should ever steal? What about a partisan group opposing an occupation? Is it allowable to steal weapons from the aggressor's depot, or must they remain moral? At what point is stealing permissible?
The situations you are describing are essentially war time or marshal law style events. Under those circumstances almost all laws are either suspended or unable to be enforced and essentially the fabric of society is already severed.
The same "arguments" could be made by replacing the word "steal" with "murder" and I would still have the same position and principles, because I also do not condone murder even if the person being murdered is someone I despise.
I think in all contexts stealing is wrong, it's just in some contexts stealing being wrong doesn't matter because the alternative of dying makes it a moot point.
> What about a partisan group opposing an occupation?
This was answered as essentially war-time activity. It's still wrong to steal from someone, but again the alternative of being killed makes it a moot point.
> At what point is stealing permissible?
Stealing is still wrong, it's just that it can obviously exist in scenarios that are so wrong for other reasons that the stealing is the least of concern.
I never thought it would happen. I thought surely she would be deemed too pretty, too smart, or something, and not go to jail. I do not believe she thinks she did anything wrong
It's odd how vilified Holmes has become, and how gleeful people--even in these comments--are at her lengthy prison sentence for a nonviolent crime.
She faked it until she (didn't) make it--a strategy praised in other startup narratives. Most of that faking involved secretly running blood tests on traditional test equipment instead of her in-development devices.
I believe there were a handful of tests done on their development devices that returned questionable results for actual patients, which I'm hoping is where all the angry people are focused. But to that point, how accurate and responsible are traditional testing facilities? I personally have had my bloodwork mixed up with someone else's, causing quite a lot of anxiety and extra work from me to sort out.
There are countless instances of labs forging results[0][1], making mistakes[2], and issues with equipment[3] (citations are just the most easily at hand).
Some of the stories cited resulted in criminal convictions, like 3 years for someone who faked thousands of drug-test results leading to false convictions. Compared to what Holmes did, it's hard to see how 11 years (and our society's complete fascination and vilification of her) is appropriate.
Um, they hounded at least one person to suicide, and produced erroneous results for people with life threatening conditions. I'm not sure how you get to "non violent" from there, but you do you.
"Nonviolent" does have a pretty straightforward definition that I think you can differentiate from your examples if you were inclined to judge impartially.
When you're predisposed to an opinion, it's easy to come up with justifications. Often those result in misreading/misinterpreting information and then spreading that misinformation for more folks to use as justification.
I don't want to draft a speculative narrative about someone else's life (or its sad end) but I will say that your first allegation sounds like a misinterpretation of the events, at least from reading the Wikipedia article about who you're referring to.
It's one thing "faking it until you make it" where consumer trinkets and timewasterish websites are concerned, it's a whole other matter where people's health and lives are at risk. That isn't an arena for faking it.
The first things I think of with "fake it til you make it" are Tesla FSD[0] and Reddit[1]. To this day, if you visit Reddit while logged out it makes the claim that it's a place for "empathy"[2].
Reddit is a hotbed of harassment, targeted abuse, political extremism, celebration of violence, and encouragement of health disorders. Depending on Tesla's self driving technology has gotten people killed. Let me know if you want any citations for those claims but I think you probably know examples of what I'm referring to in each case.
I would posit that people's health and lives are more at risk in both examples, but nobody is being imprisoned for it. Both companies are well aware of the risks but choose to profit off it rather than take responsibility.
A decade is very reasonable for intentionally, knowingly committing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fraud and attempting to sustain it across many years of time.
She's little more than a highly skilled, pathological con-artist that worked over a very affluent system (Silicon Valley primarily).
It's not odd how vilified she has become. She appears to be severely deranged, has shown zero remorse for the crimes she committed, and has tried every trick in the bag to try to get out of taking responsibility legally for what she did.
> She faked it until she (didn't) make it--a strategy praised in other startup narratives.
That is not what she did. Holmes committed outright financial fraud by lying to - intentionally misleading - the investors and employees in just about the most epic way you could. She attempted to cover it up repeatedly, keeping the extent of their failures even from the board members whenever possible.
And last but not least, it's the highly regulated healthcare field (everyone here grasps the difference), not a little text search engine (eg Excite was a famous example of faking it until you make it during the dotcom bubble, they bid on a Netscape search deal, for promotion of their service, before they had the money to pay for it, on the basis that they could raise the money if they had the deal; however it's not usually a crime to commit to buy something before you have the money to do so).
Really quite amazing how she was literally convicted more than a year ago, and has been able to remain out of prison since then.
When plenty of people - generally lower income - end up in jail before they've been to trial, let alone be convicted - that someone found guilty, and with the ability and repeated attempts to leave the country is allowed to stay in a palatial mansion is utter BS.
86 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadAnd I cannot wait to see the stupid prize that "altruistic genius" SBF gets.
She can afford a round trip ticket, bought at the airport on the day of departure. Or fled across the Mexico border. Or smuggled herself out on a boat. There are SO MANY ways to flee the country that are not shouting "HEY FYI TO THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT — I'M LEAVING FOR A BIT".
Facing 11 years of it after being a part of the 1% can lead to some pretty human, pretty stupid decisions.
She isn't some hardened street criminal with a "Go bag".
> Prosecutors had attempted to argue that Holmes did pose a flight risk, revealing that her partner had bought her a one-way flight to Mexico shortly before the verdict was returned. While Davila called the travel plans a “bold move” and Holmes’s failure to cancel the ticket post-conviction a “perilously careless oversight”, he accepted her assertion that she was not trying to flee the country.
Even getting into a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty isn't going to help you. An extradition treaty is just a streamlined process for extraditing criminals - unless you're a natural citizen, or there's a particular geopolitical reason (Snowden), there's ~zero reason for why your host country won't make a one-off exemption for you.
What would the feds be willing to pay for her? Snowden got asylum so some minor power could piss off and show up a geo-political rival. She would just gift 1 million dollars to some king who would just claim that she was not in his county when America came asking for her extradition.
Not quite sure there's a golf course there. Here's an overview of the same jail a "real housewives of salt lake city" is in.
https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/7141761/jen-shahs-pris...
"It’s unclear why Shah asked to serve at that specific prison but People says other notable inmates who have been sent to the Bryan camp have included Hidalgo County, Texas, Commissioner Sylvia Handy; Jenna Ryan, who participated in the January 6 Capitol attack; and Lea Fastow, a former assistant treasurer at Enron."
https://www.kbtx.com/2023/01/08/reality-tv-star-wants-serve-...
I wonder if the buildings have A/C. Summer in Texas can be pretty hot
Except Martha Stewart was released from prison 18 years ago[0], Bernie Madoff is male, so is in a men's prison and those with Federal prison sentences of ten years or longer are not eligible for minimum security (or "club fed", as you put it) facilities[1]. As such, she will likely serve her sentence in a "low security" facility rather than a "minimum security" facility[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Stewart
[1] I searched around and couldn't find the specific rules. However, I posted here (several years ago, not going to go through a few hundred pages of posting history to find it. Sorry.) about wanting to commit a non-violent, Federal felony and receive a long Federal prison sentence in a minimum security ("club fed") facility as a retirement strategy on a par with Medicaid funded assisted living facilities. The former not requiring you to spend all your assets (okay, you can keep $2000) to be eligible. I was informed, with links that sentences of ten years or more are not eligible for Federal minimum security facilities.
Medicaid is a state-federal program, and states may have higher asset limits (Californa, for instance, raised it from the federal baseline $2000 individual/$3000 married couple to $130,000 + $65,000 for additional family member.)
I was unaware that there was variation by state. Thanks for sharing that!
Either way, while Mrs. Holmes won't quite have an 18-hole golf course at her new digs, my point still stands. She'll be out before she's 50.
So you think Holmes got off too lightly, yes?
Maybe she did. I don't know.
Eleven years is a pretty long time, especially if you're in a crowded place without the ability to leave.
What would you suggest instead? Put her in a male supermax prison and let the inmates have at her? Or just put two bullets in the back of her head?
Either way, it's no skin off my nose. Although, TBH I think an extended supermax prison-wide gang rape might be overkill.
But I'd be fine with two in the back of the head.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_parole_in_the_United_S... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_conduct_time#:~:text=Good....
Michael Conahan from kids for cash was sentenced to 17.5 years and only served 10 before being allowed to go to home confinement - I'm sure Elizabeth can find a way.
* The law says 54 but in practice it's 47.
Both are allies of the US and even though France is from time to time prone to do some diplomatic PR stunts they don't exactly love her kind of fraud.
Israels government is currently busy with internal politics and America can lean very heavily on them.
Her only realistic option would be someplace that doesn't like America and is big enough to not be worth the effort of pressuring them.
And they would need to be willing to take in someone who defrauded patients for profit. Not quite eye to eye with someone like snowden
https://www.evanshotels.com/
I guess in the end there we're more innocent victims than ghouls taken to the cleaners.
Yes. There were[0]. Not sure why you'd give Holmes points for defrauding folks as well though.
Do you really think she would have acted differently if the investors were Mother Teresa[1] and similar?
[0] https://archive.is/bauWr (Wall Street Journal)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missionary_Position:_Mothe...
She was pretty good at convincing people that she was predominantly doing the latter, though.
[1] With allegations of unethical forced deathbed conversions.
She is not a person to look up to. Organized religion disappoints, 99 times out of 100
― Steven Weinberg
Murdoch and co’s only life skill is being rich which mesmerizes those who think fiat economics and American civic life are divine mandates of a higher power even if they don’t belong to a traditional religion.
I actually selected her as an example because off the cuff I couldn't think of someone else that some significant proportion of folks here on HN wouldn't say exactly that about. I guess I shouldn't have used a real person as an example. Lesson learned. N.B.: I am an atheist and find the Catholic Church (not specific Catholic adherents, I judge individuals based on their individual behavior) to be, in the main, a bad thing.
My point wasn't to glorify Mother Teresa (or anyone else). Rather, I was pointing out that it wouldn't have mattered who Theranos' investors were, Holmes would have defrauded them too.
Perhaps a better example would have been an attorney who works 60 hours a week at their day job doing pro-bono cases and litigating malicious/unfair prosecutions of innocent people, then funds and runs a soup kitchen/food pantry for the hungry another 40 hours a week. Is that better?
I'm sure some segment of the folks here will decry even that person too, as a rabble-rouser trying to destroy civilization through wealth redistribution (one bowl of soup and a piece of bread at a time) and questioning the authority of the police and prosecutors.
Who are, of course, the salt of the earth and only do what they do for the best of reasons (cf. The Innocence Project, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, The Central Park Five, etc., etc,. etc.) /s
So I'll make the point again without the distraction (causing folks to ignore my point -- apologies for sending you down the Mother Teresa rat hole?) of an actual, flawed, human being:
Holmes would almost certainly have defrauded any investors, regardless of your (the general 'you' here) opinion of the value of that particular persons' moral/ethical bona fides.
Even if I dislike people I still don't condone stealing from them.
Laws are the tools written to control the general public by the elites, good luck with that.
This is a hilariously naive take on how the world works
Persecuting based on class in a society with such an unequal distribution of wealth? Fair game.
They're already at war with us; don't carry their water for them and pretend we're "equal before the law" or some such nonsense. We clearly aren't.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/1/31/galant-welcomin...
The same "arguments" could be made by replacing the word "steal" with "murder" and I would still have the same position and principles, because I also do not condone murder even if the person being murdered is someone I despise.
I think in all contexts stealing is wrong, it's just in some contexts stealing being wrong doesn't matter because the alternative of dying makes it a moot point.
> What about a partisan group opposing an occupation?
This was answered as essentially war-time activity. It's still wrong to steal from someone, but again the alternative of being killed makes it a moot point.
> At what point is stealing permissible?
Stealing is still wrong, it's just that it can obviously exist in scenarios that are so wrong for other reasons that the stealing is the least of concern.
ya blind justice is outdated.
She faked it until she (didn't) make it--a strategy praised in other startup narratives. Most of that faking involved secretly running blood tests on traditional test equipment instead of her in-development devices.
I believe there were a handful of tests done on their development devices that returned questionable results for actual patients, which I'm hoping is where all the angry people are focused. But to that point, how accurate and responsible are traditional testing facilities? I personally have had my bloodwork mixed up with someone else's, causing quite a lot of anxiety and extra work from me to sort out.
There are countless instances of labs forging results[0][1], making mistakes[2], and issues with equipment[3] (citations are just the most easily at hand).
Some of the stories cited resulted in criminal convictions, like 3 years for someone who faked thousands of drug-test results leading to false convictions. Compared to what Holmes did, it's hard to see how 11 years (and our society's complete fascination and vilification of her) is appropriate.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epic-drug-lab-scandal-r...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/dec/13/scath...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-63795285
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn
When you're predisposed to an opinion, it's easy to come up with justifications. Often those result in misreading/misinterpreting information and then spreading that misinformation for more folks to use as justification.
I don't want to draft a speculative narrative about someone else's life (or its sad end) but I will say that your first allegation sounds like a misinterpretation of the events, at least from reading the Wikipedia article about who you're referring to.
Reddit is a hotbed of harassment, targeted abuse, political extremism, celebration of violence, and encouragement of health disorders. Depending on Tesla's self driving technology has gotten people killed. Let me know if you want any citations for those claims but I think you probably know examples of what I'm referring to in each case.
I would posit that people's health and lives are more at risk in both examples, but nobody is being imprisoned for it. Both companies are well aware of the risks but choose to profit off it rather than take responsibility.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-08/tesla-laws...
[1] https://www.inc.com/karl-and-bill/best-advice-fake-it-until-...
[2] https://i.imgur.com/y1Sicxl.png
She's little more than a highly skilled, pathological con-artist that worked over a very affluent system (Silicon Valley primarily).
It's not odd how vilified she has become. She appears to be severely deranged, has shown zero remorse for the crimes she committed, and has tried every trick in the bag to try to get out of taking responsibility legally for what she did.
> She faked it until she (didn't) make it--a strategy praised in other startup narratives.
That is not what she did. Holmes committed outright financial fraud by lying to - intentionally misleading - the investors and employees in just about the most epic way you could. She attempted to cover it up repeatedly, keeping the extent of their failures even from the board members whenever possible.
And last but not least, it's the highly regulated healthcare field (everyone here grasps the difference), not a little text search engine (eg Excite was a famous example of faking it until you make it during the dotcom bubble, they bid on a Netscape search deal, for promotion of their service, before they had the money to pay for it, on the basis that they could raise the money if they had the deal; however it's not usually a crime to commit to buy something before you have the money to do so).
When plenty of people - generally lower income - end up in jail before they've been to trial, let alone be convicted - that someone found guilty, and with the ability and repeated attempts to leave the country is allowed to stay in a palatial mansion is utter BS.